Some Great Western Railway Information

A selection of drawings of locomotives, coaches and goods wagons
and other related information.

An Introduction to Great Western Locomotive Development

My introductory study of GWR steam locomotive classes is
now available.You
may order it from here. Its intended to fall somewhere between
the RCTS books, now long out of print, and Russell's books of
illustrations.

"...an extremely useful single point of reference" -
Adrian Knowles - Great Western Echo

Sketches by the Author

I created this series of drawings to illustrate development and
variations caused by boiler changes and other developments in various
classes and to illustrate some pieces I have written as features for
the GWR Modelling Website.
They are worked up from the GWR Diagrams, so they have all their
limitations and more besides. For more information about the
limitations of these sketches see this page
about how I created them.

Official GWR Weight Diagrams

The GWR weight diagrams which were hosted here were orginally
compiled by John Daniel on his excellent site Great Western Archive but
were unavailable for a while and so members of the GWR Elist
reassembled the collection. As the original collection is now
available again it seems best to point people back at the originals
as we were never able to contact Mr. Daniel to ask his permission to
reproduce them here.

I have learned that its easy to be seduced by the quality of the
draughtsmanship of the original GWR drawings into supposing that
these Weight Diagrams comprise a suitable reference for modellers.
This doesn't seem to be the case. Even at my level of competence I
can detect inconsistencies - safety valve covers are rarely
symmetrical for instance - and even distortions. Some of these
probably came in various reproductions along the way, but some seem
to me to be original. I am not a trained engineer, nor do I know much
about heavy engineering practice, but I am quite sure that all
manufacture was done from the numerous detailed drawings of each
component, and that whilst you can almost certainly trust the
dimensions written on drawings, scaling dimensions from them should
be done with extreme caution.

The original articles on these pages are mainly contractions from my book, "An Introduction to Great Western Locomotive Development", a
study of Great Western Railway locomotive classes, which is published by Pen and Sword Books.
You may order it from here.